The emergence of autonomous artificial intelligence – Hoshio

Technology leaders and experts are constantly talking about their predictions for the future of artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently said that there are probably more AI agents in the world than humans. Also, Google has a lot of focus on these agents and its senior developers have mentioned that assistants and AI agents can make a big difference.

Entry of agents

Kyndryl is one of the technology companies that is active in the field of artificial intelligence. The company was spun off from IBM in 2021 and is now the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services. Kindril provides services in various areas including cloud services, security, network, business and various applications and has invested significantly in artificial intelligence.

Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran, Chief Technology Officer of Kindril India, said in an exclusive interview: “We have many customers and these customers operate in all industries. “They are looking for ways to apply and exploit AI in their environments.” He also pointed out that most companies use productive artificial intelligence in the field of production. In fact, their use of generative artificial intelligence is not limited to the stage of prototyping and design.

Venkateswaran talked about the future of artificial intelligence applications and emphasized that agentic AI will bring about significant changes in the way things work.

“We use AI agents when we need different ways to solve a problem,” Venkateswaran said. For example, when we talk to a customer, the artificial intelligence system refers the questions to the appropriate department to give the best answer. One department may take information from internal data and another department may access online information from external sources. This will help us answer questions faster and better.”

Venkateswaran explained that their collaborative workflow, where multiple agents answer different aspects of a problem based on a query, is a prime example of agent AI. He emphasized that they use these patterns of AI agents effectively to solve various practical challenges that their customers face.

Agent artificial intelligence, the future of technology

Venkateswaran defines agent AI as a concept that combines language models, custom code, data, and APIs to create intelligent workflows to solve business problems. He emphasized the importance of this development and noted that AI and data are particularly valuable in India, due to the abundance of data and skilled AI professionals. “We believe that this area is growing and is an important aspect for us,” he said.

Artificial intelligence represents a shift towards more autonomous decision-making systems. In this context, an “agent” means a piece of code that can perceive its environment through sight, sound, or text and make decisions based on inputs.

This feature can be from simple tasks such as generating creative code and sharing it through WhatsApp, to complex functions; such as supply chain management or improving customer interaction systems.

“An agent takes initiative and automatically makes decisions to solve problems,” Venkateswaran said.

Venkateswaran, with more than 28 years of experience working in technology and 25 years at IBM (before moving to Kyndryl), emphasizes the importance of broad technical skills and hands-on programming, and cautions against over-specialization. “Leadership is important, but you also need to have C-level skills,” he says. In fact, this issue indicates the need for both leadership and technical expertise.

He also teaches at BITS Pilani University and emphasizes that basic skills like math and algorithms are still very important despite the changes in the industry.

“Neural networks needed large sets of data to learn and perform complex tasks,” Venkateswaran said of advances in AI systems. However, with basic models such as GPT that are pre-trained, this need is significantly reduced.” He also said: “Learning from small data can no longer be relied upon as a human advantage.”

Detailed artificial intelligence support

The CTO talks about the applications of Kinderil in various fields, how artificial intelligence has helped improve customer interaction in industries such as retail and transportation. He believes that artificial intelligence will help to create more accurate approaches in this field.

“Customer engagement is more than a simple Q&A with a chatbot,” he says. In fact, he believes that to reproduce or enhance real-world interactions, AI must be able to “understand the sentiments of the text or the allusions” and respond appropriately to the recognized language.

Kindril has also found useful applications in the fields of education, healthcare and finance. “All clients want us to find ways to use this new technology to detect fraud, anomalies and suspicious transactions,” says Venkateswaran.

He also explains that post-Covid, the use of generative AI in the education industry has skyrocketed. AI now helps evaluate descriptive answers in exams and create custom questions. In healthcare, AI improves communication between patients and providers by interpreting symptoms better than traditional keyword searches.

“Any project that involves AI and data is usually a modern project,” he says. If generative artificial intelligence is also used, this project will be even more advanced; “So, there really isn’t much difference between an AI program and a modern one.”

Kindril works with big companies like Google Cloud to responsibly develop AI solutions and help customers adopt this technology faster. “We have specific partnerships with each of these companies, all of which are tailored to our needs, and then we think about what we can offer to customers,” Vengteswaran said.